Putting PackageKit metadata on the Fedora LiveCD

While working on the preview of GNOME Software for Fedora 20, one problem became very apparent: When you launched the “Software” application for the first time, it went and downloaded metadata and then built the libsolv cache. This could take a few minutes of looking at a spinner, and was a really bad first experience. We tried really hard to mitagate this, in that when we ask PackageKit for data we say we don’t mind the cache being old, but on a LiveCD or on first install there wasn’t any metadata at all.

So, what are we doing for F21? We can’t run packagekitd when constructing the live image as it’s a D-Bus daemon and will be looking at the system root, not the live-cd root. Enter packagekit-direct. This is an admin-only tool (no man page) installed in /usr/libexec that designed to be run when you want to run the PackageKit backend without getting D-Bus involved.

For Fedora 21 we’ll be running something like DESTDIR=$INSTALL_ROOT /usr/libexec/packagekit-direct refresh in fedora-live-workstation.ks. This means that when the Live image is booted we’ve got both the distro metadata to use, and the libsolv files already built. Launching gnome-software then takes 440ms until it’s usable.

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

4 thoughts on “Putting PackageKit metadata on the Fedora LiveCD”

    1. It’s in libexec (libdir/packagekit on debian iirc), which I think makes it exempt. Certainly from a RHEL point of view, anyway :)

      1. Since this will end up in /usr/lib/packagekit in Debian, no manpage is required (would of course be nice, but…)
        Great to finally see a tool for direct access to PK backends ;-) We most certainly want to use it in Debian as well.

  2. WoW, so much great progress. I am glad you are the contributor Richard, because I can really see your passion for your work on each new article that you write :)

    Keep it up! GNOME Software can only get better :D

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